The Journey Towards a Smart CSSD

As the population grows, the demand for healthcare services is rapidly increasing. By 2030, the world will be home to more than 8.5 billion people, placing additional strain on healthcare systems worldwide. At the same time, pace of population aging continues to increase, thus requiring more care for a larger number of people. All countries face major challenges to ensure that their health systems are ready to manage this demographic shift.

To meet these challenges, healthcare organizations are investing heavily in digital technologies that improve operational efficiency, increase visibility into critical assets and processes, and enables more data driven decision making. Digitalized hospitals are already showing they have the largest potential for “rapid positive impact” on pressurized healthcare infrastructures and operations.

What is a Smart Hospital?

At its core, a smart hospital leverages connected technologies that contribute to enhancing personnel productivity, facilitating hospital operations, improving process quality, and ensuring patient safety by integrating multiple technologies. These new advances involve medical devices, smart information systems, facility control and automated systems, location-based services, sensors and digital communication tools into health processes.
Connected systems help healthcare organizations transform operational data into actionable insights which improve efficiency, support informed decision making and create greater predictability across hospital operations.

Why SPDs must evolve

Sterile processing departments are among the most operationally intensive areas within a hospital. As volume of surgeries increases, staffing challenges continue. SPDs are expected to process more and more instruments, maintain complete traceability, minimize downtime and support the OR efficiency, all the while maintaining highest standards of patient safety.
Many departments today still rely on fragmented information, manual documentation and reactive maintenance practices. As a result, departments become distracted – valuable staff time is spent on searching for information, troubleshooting equipment issues and manually margining records instead of focusing on operational excellence.

Advantages for staff and patients

In a smart hospital:

• Digitalized processes optimize workflows within the hospital
• Smart technology helps ensure the right teams are activated quickly and ORs are ready when needed
• Resource data is used to efficiently manage hospital resources
• Smart solutions improve time and space management
• Staff can focus on patients and not on problems, enabling a better patient experience

Why digitalization matters

According to McKinsey & Company, the business case for smart hospitals is already very strong. Experience suggests that in most OECD countries, implementing digital technologies in healthcare delivery can help to realize cost savings of more than 10% of overall annual national healthcare expenditures. (McKinsey & Company, 2019)

Digital transformation is not simply about adopting new and shiny technology. It is about eliminating inefficiencies, improving visibility and enabling decision making. For SPDs specifically, digitalization creates opportunities to optimize your capital asset utilization, streamline compliance documentation, reduce any extra manual effort and improve collaboration & communication of the SPD with other relevant functions like Biomed, facilities, engineering OR and the vendor’s service teams.

For smart hospitals to work, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. It takes a complex integration of myriad of technologies to “speak” to one another. Smart hospitals do not attempt to deliver all services under one roof, but essential services are critical. One of the requirements to support the increased demand for surgical procedures is to automate, as much as possible, the SPD itself. Digital solutions are an integral part of this.

The cost of standing still

Without digitalization, critical information often remains trapped withing silos, within machines, spreadsheets, paper records or people. This can lead to increased administrative burden, slower troubleshooting, reduced equipment utilization, delayed service response, missed opportunities for operational improvement and most of all, knowledge retention, when people move.

As departments face ever increasing demand, the ability to access, analyze and act upon operational data becomes a strategic advantage for a hospital, rather than a “nice-to-have” capability.

Smart, Digitalized SPD

Your machines are talking. Are you listening?

Imagine an SPD as smart as your facility and staff. A fully connected environment where operational information is available in real time, processes are monitored from an app, where equipment performance is visible from anywhere and decision making is driven by data rather than assumptions… Sounds like a sci-fi movie in a distant future? No, this is now a practical reality for healthcare organizations.

Modern SPD equipment generates a tremendous amount of operational data. However, that data alone is of little value unless it can be captured, organized and transformed into useful information.

Connectivity solutions bridge the gap between equipment, staff, instrument tracking systems and service organizations. By automatically collecting machine cycle data and making it available across the organization, hospitals can reduce manual administrative work, improve traceability and gain greater operational visibility.

Digital connectivity supports audit readiness, accelerates troubleshooting efforts, and helps ensure that critical sterilization information is available when and where it is needed.

At SteelcoBelimed we focus on the patient, their safety, and the information needed to ensure that the products used in their surgery were properly reprocessed and sterilized when they arrive to the Operating Room. We designed our digital solution, SmartHub, to monitor the processes required by people and machines to deliver the highest possible quality and ensure the highest levels of efficiency in the SPD.

SteelcoBelimed supports your project from planning to implementation. Our goal is to provide the solutions that will deliver the most successful product. Our common goal is to use these intelligent solutions to create added value for our field support team, users of our products, and more importantly, your patients.

We believe that a smart hospital needs a smart SPD. Both the OR and SPD can benefit from:

• Modern digital work processes
• Monetary savings
• Improved departmental efficiency
• Well informed SPD staff and service support technicians
• Quicker error resolutions
• A safer work environment

Digitalization within the SPD has a big part to play in this.

SmartHub Orbit – Transform data into actionable operational intelligence

Did you know that SteelcoBelimed washer-disinfectors and sterilizers produce up to two million data points per cycle? This includes parameters such as program steps, chemical dosing quantities, temperature, water volumes, processing times, number of cycles, and water conductivity. That is a lot of data! Through SmartHub Orbit, authorized users can securely access operational information from virtually anywhere, enabling greater visibility into equipment status, performance trends, utilization patterns, and service events. This data provides actionable insights that can be used to revolutionize the workflow of your department. We call it SmartHub Orbit.

Benefits Beyond the SPD

A digitalized SPD does not only benefit Sterile processing teams. OR personnel, Biomed teams, Facilities departments, Hospital leadership and third-party service providers all benefit from improved access to timely operational information.

Improved transparency enables faster collaboration, shorter troubleshooting cycles, more informed maintenance decisions, reduced downtime, and better alignment across departments.

A Look into the Future

What’s the next step, you might wonder? We are not fortune tellers, but a glimpse into advanced technology and changes already underway, all point to smarter hospitals, smarter systems, and smarter devices. A smarter SPD is one of the first logical steps towards a smart future.

The future of digitalization is not simply visibility. It is predictability. We envision an integrated system within the SPD that will inform the users about future machine performance. A smart system that works flawlessly to inform you well in advance when a repair would be expected. A solution that will enable you to manage operations with far more precision than ever before.

The journey towards a Smart SPD is already underway. Hospitals that embrace digitalization today will be better prepared to improve efficiency, increase predictability, support their staff and deliver the highest standards of patient care tomorrow.

Built with Security in Mind

Any successful digital transformation initiative must include cybersecurity as a foundational design principle. SmartHub has been designed to securely process equipment operational data while supporting modern hospital security requirements and access control policies.

Start Your Journey Towards a Smart SPD

To learn more about digitalization or to set up a demo, contact Regional Sales.